1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an apparatus and method for simulating phenomena, such as crystal growth, surface adsorption and surface damage, of a particle formed of substrate particles and adsorbate particles.
2. Description of the Related Art
Experimental processes have been proposed to detect and analyze the molecular details (such as, for example, film forming processes, process conditions and surface structure) of new materials. These proposed experimental processes include, for example, the use of a scanning tunneling microscope (STM) or an atomic force microscope (AFM). Unfortunately, such experimental processes are often inadequate at providing the required level of detection and analysis.
Therefore, it is often required to simulate a phenomena at the atomic and/or molecule level to detect various processes involved in the phenomena. The simulated phenomena can include, for example, crystal growth, surface adsorption and surface damage of a material or structure.
Simulation has been attempted by a molecular dynamics method, but it has been very difficult to manually execute such simulation. For example, the simulation requires different data of various particles to be input to the simulation process for molecular dynamics computation. Thus, the required data includes a large amount of different data for each simulation particle. This different data must be manually entered. The simulation particles include, for example, atoms and molecules.
Therefore, a program has been developed to generate molecule data for each particle. However, the generation of the molecule data requires a relatively long time since the program must be run separately for each individual particle to generate data for the particle. Moreover, different programs must be run to generate data for different phenomena.